Happy Haunting

I love Halloween! When I was teaching at Hillcrest and Bonneville High Schools, I required my students to write journal entries at the end of every week. They were supposed to write about sports medicine related things that had happened that week. They did this every week, except the week of Halloween. Because I'm such a ghost freak I would make them write me ghost stories. The requirements were that the stories had to be true (they had to experience it themselves, or they had to have heard it from someone they knew who experienced it), and it had to have happened near Idaho Falls. Then I would turn out the lights in the classroom and read everyone's stories with a flashlight. It was so much fun! I have a TON of really good ghost stories about places in and around the Idaho Falls area. I was thinking the other day that I should do whole blog page dedicated to those stories because there are a freaking lot of them! I loved it when different students would write about their experiences at the same place. I had about three students who wrote about Wolfman's Cabin in Ririe, and about 20 students wrote about the Ammon Cemetery (still places I have to check out for myself). At the very end of class I would tell them a ghost story about their school. So today I would like to relate to you the ghost story I told one of my classes about the spooky happenings in the halls of Hillcrest High.

As an athletic trainer I am at the school late many nights out of the week. My first year at Hillcrest, one of the boys basketball games had finished very late. It was deathly quiet as I cleaned the training room that night, getting ready to leave. Everyone had left the school and I was almost done. I closed the door in my office and started to walk to the training room door when I heard a tapping sound coming from one of the cabinets against the wall. I thought something might have fallen, so I opened the cabinet door, but everything was in place. I shut the door and started to leave again when I heard it again, this time a little louder. (The kids sitting near the cabinets get up and move to another place in the training room). Now I was a little scared so I made a beeline for the door. As the training room door closed behind me I heard someone begin to knock on the door I had just come out of. I freaked out and ran out of the school. A whole year went by without anything happening, and then again, one night after a long basketball game I was once again alone in the school. I was just leaving and turned out the lights in the training room before I left. In the darkness I glanced over my shoulder, and I saw something move. It was pitch black in the room, yet I swore I saw something white, over by the cabinets. It seemed to melt into the wall. (At this point the ice machine in the training room kicked on and all my students started to scream...haha!) Needless to say I got the heck out of there. After the strange things that I had witnessed I decided to ask our head janitor if he ever had any scary things happen to him. He told me that the night janitors were scared to come down the weight room hall (the same hall the athletic training room is in) because they could hear people talking and moving things around in the the rooms there. Then he told me that he had heard that there used to be an old homestead on the land where Hillcrest now sits, and that he had heard that the farmer and his family had died in a fire on the very spot the weight room and athletic training room now were. So if you ever happen to be in the school at night, I would suggest to stay away from the training room...